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truth? Please, I must know!”
    If this bizarre man, cruel enough to keep slaves, knows my face, my name, and my history, I will let him drag me the length of Dī and back. I would cut off my hands to know who I am and where I come from.
    “Please!” I beg, but he doesn’t answer. He must hear me.
    I call out again and again, but the wagon doesn’t slow, and I hear nothing but the occasional complaints of the donkey. Sighing, my chest trying to pull away from itself, I lay my head back on the hard wood of the wagon and stare at the dots of sky seeping through the burlap sack.
    It’s a long ride. Long enough that, despite the roughness of the wagon bed and the pain throbbing in my arms, I manage to sleep. For how long, I’m not sure. It’s in and out.
    We stop after nightfall. My buyer grabs me by my feet and hauls me to the edge of the wagon, barely keeping me upright when I tip over the lip and stumble. He guides me over loose dirt and up a creaking porch step. The building we enter is darker than the outdoors, but he lights two lamps, sits me on a wicker footstool, and pulls the bag off my head.
    I blink several times to clear my vision. Pieces of my short hair have glued themselves to my forehead and cheeks with perspiration. One tickles the corner of my mouth. My new owner sees this and brushes the strands back, looking at me excitedly with those brilliant and terrifying eyes.
    “I’m not a slave,” I say, raspy. My throat is dry, and my stomach wrings itself with hunger. My shoulders have gone numb.
    “I know you’re not,” he says, and he pulls a small knife from his pocket. I cringe, but he merely steps behind me and begins sawing through my binds.
    Trying to work up enough spit to swallow, I take a look at his house. It is a house—I can see into a small kitchen from where I sit—but it’s sparsely furnished. It could belong to anyone. There’s no personality on the walls, other than places where the wood has been bitten into by a whittling knife, maybe fingernails, over and over, seemingly at random. There are only two pieces of furniture in the room, both chairs, neither matching. One, like the footrest I’m on, is wicker; the other appears to be cotton, its striped blue pattern worn to whiteness across the back and seat.
    My binds come loose, and my shoulders scream as they relax back into their normal position. Biting my lip, I lean forward and breathe sharp breaths. My hands tingle as blood rushes back into them. My fingertips throb.
    I try to ignore the pain and focus on the man’s words. “Then you’ll let me go?”
    He laughs, that same high-pitched, girlish laugh. “Of course not! I’ve been looking everywhere for you. For a long, long time. I didn’t know where you’d gone.”
    Ants crawl through my veins as I watch him sit on the chair diagonal to me. My heart is thumping, making me light-headed.
    The lamplight makes his face look almost green. He grins widely, though neither his cheeks nor his eyes wrinkle with the effort. He crosses one leg over the other and knits his long fingers around the higher knee.
    And I feel it. I can’t describe how, but studying him in this light, he looks . . . familiar to me. What about him is familiar, I can’t tell. I can’t even guess. Some sliver of nostalgia nags at me, but when I try to pinpoint it, the sensation slips away, and I wonder if I ever felt it at all.
    “I don’t know you,” I try.
    The grin fades just a little. “Of course. That’s all right. That is perfect. This will be good. Very good.”
    Perhaps he has merely been looking for a woman of my make, of my appearance. Not me, precisely. Maybe he doesn’t know anything about me at all, for if he did, he certainly wouldn’t be treating me this way.
    “Your name?” he asks. The question burns through every flutter of hope working its way through my body. Even I remember my name. If this man truly held the key to my two decades of missing memories, he would surely know my